Virtualization

Virtualization

Virtualization is not yet a commodity in large enterprises: the concept is well accepted; most firms have significant portions of the server estate virtualised; virtualisation technologies are maturing; and core skills are readily available, however, as the virtual estate grows, so too do the platform, commercial and operational challenges.

Server virtualization

Citihub is helping its clients in resolving specific challenges relating to server virtualization platform, business case and operations, as well as helping drive forward aggressive adoption programs.

Talking to our enterprise customers, familiar patterns and challenges emerge relating to server virtualisation:

• Server virtualisation has been successfully embraced to the point where typically, 20-30% of server operating system instances are virtual. One or two of the more aggressive financial services firms are up to 40%
• Common visions around efficient future state architecture and cloud computing are driving new targets for aggressive virtualisation adoption  - up to 90% within 3 to 5 years.
• For many, that translates into non-trivial five-fold increases in adoption rates.
• Many platform owners recognise that current platforms need to change significantly to cater for the extra volumes and the complexities of a bigger push into the production space
• In many cases, the efficiencies being realised by virtualisation need to be improved to live up to business case expectations
• Many program owners recognise that ramping up adoption rates becomes harder as the focus changes (from low hanging fruit, dev, test and new demand) to proactive production P2Vs (physical to virtual migrations)
• Many operations owners recognise that legacy processes, developed for the physical world, need top-down re-engineering for a virtual world with increasing levels of automation and self-service

 >> 2000 server P2V migrations and decoms in 1 year (Case Study)